Out of the Study by Anssi Raisanen [Comp02]

IFDB page: Out of the Study
Final placement: 24th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

A few years ago, I made up some vocabulary to describe a common aspect of IF. I’m not really sure if anybody else uses it, but I’ve found it immensely handy. The vocabulary is this: I call a noun that appears in a room description a “first-level noun.” These nouns either will or won’t have descriptions implemented, and the more of them that are described, the better, in my opinion. Nouns that appear in the descriptions of first-level nouns I call second-level nouns. Nouns from second-level descriptions are third-level, and so on. The deeper these levels go, the more complete and immersive the interactive environment, as we’ve seen in previous games like Hunter, In Darkness and Worlds Apart. Out Of The Study puts this technique to some of the best use I’ve ever seen, going very deep indeed with its levels of description:

> x family photo
In the photo you see the professor together with his family.

> x family
The professor is standing in the photo with his wife and five
children.

> x children
The photo is really rather old as the children in it are still very
young. You know that none of them lives at home anymore. On the left
there are twin boys, looking to be of the age at which they have just
started going to school. In the middle, the youngest child, just a
baby, is sitting in her mother's lap. It seems to be hardly one year
old: you cannot tell if it's a boy or a girl, even from the clothes.
[...]

> x baby
The baby, whose sex you are not able to tell, is dressed in a pink
overall.

> x overall
It is just an ordinary babies' outfit.

Given that OOTS is a one-room game, this depth of implementation goes a very long way towards making the environment feel real and interactive. Intriguingly, the point of this depth isn’t just to increase immersion; it’s actually an element of the game’s puzzles, and clues are often buried several levels deep. Enlightenment, from Comp98, explored this technique a little, but OOTS takes it much further.

This game’s puzzles are definitely its best feature. Like many one-room games, it has only a modicum of plot — you’re a thief who has been trapped inside the place you’re robbing, and you must investigate the environment to figure out how to escape. To do so, you have to figure out the mindset of the room’s occupant, and all the regular puzzles are subsections of that overriding goal. The design is generally sound, and I appreciated the fact that the environment was so richly implemented, but it would have been a lot more fun were it not so buggy. There’s a bit of an insect theme in this game, but actual game bugs are not welcome no matter how many metalevels of irony they provide.

Some of the problems may have been due to the ALAN parser; for instance, I found I couldn’t refer to objects by their adjectives, as in the following example where both a “torn photograph” and a “family photograph” are in scope:

> x photograph
[It is not clear which photograph you mean.]

> x torn
[You must supply a noun.]

Being able to refer to an object by any of its name words is a behavior I’ve come to love in IF, and I missed it a great deal during this game. Other things were clearly the game’s fault. For instance, “examine” and “read” were implemented as different verbs, but their implementation was not well-tested, resulting in exchanges like this:

> read books
There is nothing written on the books.

Hope you didn’t pay too much for those books, professor — they aren’t worth the paper they aren’t written on.

Between the game’s bugs, its quirks, and its lack of a walkthrough, I came thisclose to just abandoning it altogether. Happily, some folks over at ifMUD helped me get unstuck so I could reach the ending. Unhappily, that ending is a bit of a disappointment. OOTS succumbs to the temptation to tack on a rather cutesy “twist” ending, but my reaction to it was neither “awwwww” nor “whoa!”, but rather “huh?”

In my view, all that ending does is to make hash of everything that came before, as well as to make the player’s labors seem rather fruitless. I don’t even think it can be justified as bringing some sort of justice to the thief, because it’s unclear how much reality has actually shifted, or how much we are to assume about the game as a whole. There are some good puzzles and a very well-crafted setting here, and with a round or two more of testing and a better ending, OOTS could be a pretty good piece of IF.

Rating: 7.0

Four Mile Island by Chris Charla as Anonymous [Comp02]

IFDB page: Four Mile Island
Final placement: 33rd place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Note: I can’t really think of a way to review this game without including one major spoiler. So one major spoiler is included. Just FYI.

In Comp2000, Chris Charla entered a game called Infil-Traitor, which purported to be a rickety BASIC game from 1982, but was in fact a rickety BASIC game he had programmed himself the month before the comp started. I didn’t play that game because the compiled version had a fatal bug, so it fell to the bottom of my list and I never got around to actually recompiling it in order to try the playable version. Given that I only found out after the comp was over that the entry was submitted under false pretenses, I kinda thought I’d dodged a bullet there.

I was wrong, because he did it again. Four Mile Island comes with a long and detailed readme which tells the story of how the author used to work in a warehouse that some computer magazines had used as office space and found an old, never-published type-in computer game, typed it in and entered it in the comp with the permission of the author. Even if all this was true, it’d hardly make for a promising comp entry, but of course it isn’t true, it’s just a made-up cover to allow the author to create a near-perfect facsimile of an early Eighties magazine type-in adventure game.

Of course, the question that leaps to mind here, and I’m sure I’m not the only one asking this is: why? Those who played Infil-Traitor are no doubt asking, “For God’s sake, man, why twice?” I mean, sure, it plays just like a game whose source code might appear in a 1984 computing magazine. Yeah, it’s written in BASIC. Yeah, it’s got a two-word parser. Yeah, the plot is something about the Cold War and nuclear bombs. Yeah, it’s pretty buggy. Yeah, it’s got an annoying maze. I grant all these things.

But are they virtues? They were the best we could do at the time, but are they worth recreating? Not to me, they aren’t. I actually like being able to save my game. I think UNDO is a good thing. I think it’s kind of cool how a game can end now and I can actually read the ending text because it’s not running in a DOS window that shuts down after the program exits. An exact replica of a primitive game is no more fun to play than an actual primitive game. I think that’s one of those Zen aphorisms, or something.

Of course, that’s just me. We all have our preferences. And I’m quite sure that to some, my fascination with Infocom-style text adventures and their modern descendants would be just as quirky as someone else’s fascination with type-in games. So let’s hear it for the IF competition, which allows even the strangest retro-text-gaming passions some outlet. If somebody’s idea of a good time is to write up a BASIC two-word parser game that feels just like one I might have typed into my Atari 800 when I was 14 years old, more power to ’em. It just doesn’t happen to be my idea of a good game. Tastes vary.

Rating: 4.1

BOFH by Howard Sherman [Comp02]

IFDB page: BOFH
Final placement: 26th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

So here’s an interesting one: this game assigns background reading. In fact, the author caused a bit of a dustup on the newsgroups by posting a “background reading recommended” (or, as the post put it, “reccomended”) message that some people felt was tantamount to releasing part of the game prior to the judging period. Apparently, BOFH is based on existing material, a series of stories created by Internet humorist Simon Travaglia. As per the comp rules, the author obtained permission from the copyright holder, thus slipping through the barrier that keeps this sort of thing from happening most of the time. Like the Usenet post, the game’s readme file suggests brushing up on the who, what, why, and how of the BOFH by visiting Travaglia’s web page and reading some of those stories before playing the game.

My decision on how to handle this was first to ignore the Usenet post — I’m not going to do “background reading” for one of 37 comp games I’m judging before the game is even released. Next, once I got to the game in my judging order, I decided to go ahead and read some of the material on the web page, but to count the time spent doing that as part of the two hours I’m spending on the game, as if the web archive were just one gigantic, very detailed set of feelies. Of course, one could easily spend all of two hours perusing the material, so I just took 15 minutes or so and read a few things to get the general feel.

These researches yielded the fact that BOFH stands for Bastard Operator From Hell, and that the stories are the fictional exploits of a nameless network administrator with a decidedly cruel streak. From what I could glean in a short period, the BOFH’s raison d’etre is to punish stupidity (or even ignorance) with extreme prejudice, delighting in the damage and anguish he causes, and gleefully reveling in the loot that accrues from his malicious prowess. The IF version of BOFH, then, casts me as an apprentice Bastard, eager to wreak havoc on the deserving.

Thus forearmed, I fired up the game. The very first thing I noticed was that the debugging verbs are left on. Not a good sign. Shortly after that, I discovered that the game suffers from grammar problems, and some rather poor implementation, like the laptop that can be neither opened nor switched on. Also, the writing fails to explain critical points, such as the fact that after somebody magically appears, he also apparently magically disappears without notice. It seems that newlines also frequently disappear (or rather, never appear to begin with), which looks ugly. Shortly after all that, I found the room where an NPC repeats the same exact speech over and over again, because that speech is apparently implemented as part of his “initial” property, and since he never acquires the “moved” attribute he never switches from using this attribute to a more reasonable description.

It was at about that point that I decided, “Hey, I’m a BOFH, right? It’s my job to punish stupidity with cruelty, right? Let’s go, then.” I typed TREE to get a look at the game’s object tree, then PURLOINed any items that looked interesting. I PURLOINed the NPC, which shut him up quite handily. A SHOWOBJ confirmed that indeed, his speech was implemented in his “initial” property. Tsk tsk.

After a while, the charm faded from this activity, so I just restarted the game and went through according to the walkthrough, still employing the occasional judicious PURLOIN or GONEAR when something looked like too much trouble to bother with. It doesn’t get any better. Rather than mutating entirely into the Bastard Reviewer From Hell, I’ll just say that it would seem Mr. Travaglia should have requested editorial control rather than just giving permission carte blanche, since I’d be rather surprised if this is the game he wants representing his work as IF.

My advice is to spend your time reading the stories on his archive if cruel humor is your cup of tea. They’re sure to be more entertaining and less frustrating than this game, which turns out to be less of a Bastard and more of a luser.

Rating: 3.4 (so close, but ah well, there you are)

[Postscript from 2021: This game was my first introduction to Howard Sherman, a name that lives in infamy for me. A fine explanation of him is available at the archived version of Dave Gilbert’s blog, to which I’ll just add one thing: the guy he threatened to sue for daring to publish a negative review was ME. Pathetic.]

Unraveling God by Todd Watson [Comp02]

IFDB page: Unraveling God
Final placement: 12th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

And so the legacy of Photopia continues. Here we have a linear, puzzleless narrative, told in small portions out of chronological order, each of which is preceded by a blank screen with one word in the center. Sound familiar? Of course, there are differences: all segments are told from the same point of view, and rather than being a vision of tragedy, Unraveling God is more of a morality tale in the familiar Things Man Was Not Meant To Know tradition. I also don’t mean to suggest that UG is some sort of lame rip-off. It isn’t. I don’t think this game is trying to be Photopia, but is using many of the tools that Photopia used first in order to tell its story.

What we may in fact be seeing is the development of a new subgenre of IF; maybe fragmentation is such an effective way to tell a puzzleless IF story that it’s bound to become a time-honored technique in story-heavy games. The story and the writing are certainly the feature attraction in this game. You play Gabriel Markson, a scientist who has stumbled across a way to freeze organisms in suspended animation without the use of cryogenics. You are also, as a number of well-judged character details indicate, not a very nice guy. The game’s prose does a fine job of portraying the PC as a complex villain, someone who has elaborate mental structures dedicated to justifying his behavior, and this portrayal makes his opportunities for redemption meaningful. There are one or two logical gaps in the story, but for the most part events interlock nicely, which also lends power to the story’s climax.

The technical elements, unfortunately, weren’t as trouble-free. To begin with, UG started with the inherent disadvantages of the ADRIFT parser, and didn’t manage to overcome them with careful compensation like The PK Girl did. Because the game is more or less puzzleless, the parser’s deficiencies didn’t hurt it as much as they hurt this year’s other ADRIFT game, A Party To Murder, but they were still fairly irritating. In addition, this game had its own unique problem, which was that it was plagued by a mysterious lack of articles. For instance:

X FOLDER
A typed label on the manilla folder reads, "Time Magazine draft
article." Manilla folder is closed.

GET FOLDER
You take manilla folder from the desk.

OPEN IT
(manilla folder)
You open manilla folder.

This kind of thing happened throughout the game, and kept reminding me of that old Saturday Night Live skit from the 80s where Tonto, Tarzan, and Frankenstein sing or read well-known works like “The Raven”: “Once upon… midnight dreary… While pondered… weak, weary…” The frequent injection of unintentional comedy doesn’t do much for a dramatic story. The grammar errors didn’t help either.

Still, I found some value in UG despite these flaws, and there’s one more thing I’d like to point out about it: this game is pretty clearly a work of Christian IF, and it is Christian IF done properly. I’m not a Christian, and I’ve been offended in the past by games like Jarod’s Journey whose overt mission is an evangelical one. This game chooses a richer path, which is to tell a story set in a world in which Christian myths turn out to be true, and exploring the consequences and subsequent choices for the characters once this revelation occurs. It’s not exactly great religious literature, but it does manage to portray a Christian world without condescension or arrogance. Because it allows a little complexity into its world, UG ends up a more thought-provoking and rewarding piece of work than the sort of Christian IF that just wants to shout scripture at the player.

Rating: 6.9

The PK Girl by Robert Goodwin [Comp02]

IFDB page: The PK Girl
Final placement: 6th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I like comics, and I like animation, but I’ve never really read much manga or watched much anime. It’s not that I’ve been avoiding these forms, but rather that I haven’t happened to explore them yet. I’m a little bit familiar with the concept of hentai, because of the subculture of hentai IF that seems to be out there, which was brought to the attention of the newsgroups a few years ago, primarily by the efforts of a reviewer named Craxton.

Because of my unfamiliarity with Japanese comics and animation, I think I lack some context for evaluating The PK Girl, a text adventure with a deep manga influence. First and foremost, I’m not sure what to make of the game’s extreme, almost comical insistence on rigid and stereotyped gender roles. Whether this is a convention of manga, something particular to this game, or even just a quirk of the PC I don’t know, but while I found it at first just distracting and silly, it quickly graduated to annoying and even offensive. The game puts you in the role of a male PC, and quickly demonstrates that you have some pretty sweeping assumptions about femininity, and a fair amount of anxiety about maintaining the image of your own masculinity. The former becomes apparent in the description of the first female NPC you encounter:

The girl is clothed in a silky blue dress. Long vibrant hair cascades
over her shoulders and down her back. Her countenance seems to
reflect all feminine virtue, inclusive of kindness, submissiveness,
empathy, and consciousness of time and place.

So “submissiveness” is a feminine trait, in fact a feminine virtue? And kindness and empathy are outside the male domain? Certainly the female characters don’t have a lock on self-consciousness, as evidenced by the PC’s reaction to entering a women’s clothing store:

Why did you come in here? There is nothing terribly exciting here by
any male’s estimations. To a female, this could well be a lesser
incarnation of paradise. A wealth of clothing is available on
circular racks situated in aisles throughout the store, for trying on
and for purchase. The exit is west.

Yes, we know that all women love clothes-shopping. And men have no interest whatsoever in women’s fashion, which is why all fashion designers are women. Oh, wait. At its worst moments, the game spits out statements that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Victorian behavior manual:

GET PLATE
You don't need to take the plate; There are females here to clean up
after you.

Give me a break! If this is a manga thing, I don’t think I’ll be reading manga anytime soon.

On the technical (and more positive) side, The PK Girl is the long-awaited game that rises above ADRIFT‘s initial limitations to take a place among games created by the top-tier development systems. An unbelievable amount of care has gone into crafting this game. First of all, it addresses all the flaws in the ADRIFT parser that I’ve railed about in previous reviews. The game handles conversation very smoothly indeed, blending the ASK ABOUT approach with a menu-based approach in a somewhat similar fashion to my Earth And Sky games. On the rare occasions when the parser asks a question, it’s almost always prepared to handle the answer. SEARCH works, and in fact it works better than in most games, because the game explicitly assumes that it includes looking under and looking behind an object, and says so. Best of all, I never encountered the generic “Nothing special” message for an unrecognized noun, partly because the game changed the default message to be more Inform-like, but mostly because nouns are implemented in exquisite depth.

For that matter, not only are almost all nouns described, but a prodigious number are included in the first place. I didn’t come close to finishing this game in the two hours allotted, but I must confess that may be my own fault, because I frequently deserted the plot in order to wander around the game and marvel at the level of detail included. For this virtue alone, The PK Girl is one of the most immersive games in this year’s comp. In addition to its significant improvement on the standard ADRIFT parser, the game also includes professional-looking illustrations and an enjoyable MIDI soundtrack. This latter can get a little grating after a while, and I sometimes wished that a piece of music would play once and stop rather than continuously looping (or that I at least had the option of making the game behave that way), but it did enhance the scenes’ mood quite effectively.

As for the story itself, I found it pretty entertaining. After a fairly tranquil opening, the plot kicks into high gear with a dramatic incident, and events follow sensibly upon each other from there on. NPCs help propel the story forward by sometimes continuing about their business without waiting for the PC, thus forcing the player to keep up or lose the plot entirely. As I said, I didn’t get all the way through the story, but the portion I saw delivered excitement and fun, even if the writing sometimes had an oddly elevated tone which worked counter to the brisk pace. There were some problem spots in the writing, phrases that didn’t make much sense or that suggested with their awkwardness a few lapses in English skill. Still, for the most part they didn’t get in the way of the game’s ability to tell a good story.

Because its story is fun and quite chaste, The PK Girl might make a nice IF selection for kids, though perhaps it ought to be counterpointed by something rather less sexist. In fact, although I’m clueless about anime, the game reminded me distinctly of another branch of animation, the Disney feature film: technically impressive and proficient while remaining on the political level utterly, utterly reactionary.

Rating: 8.4

Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me! by Mike Sousa and Jon Ingold [Comp02]

IFDB page: Till Death Makes a Monk-Fish Out of Me
Final placement: 2nd place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Oh, hallelujah. All through last year’s comp, I kept waiting for a game to come along that I loved enough, and found few enough flaws in, that I could rate it 9.5 or above. It never happened. While there were some excellent games last year, none of them felt to me like they’d entered that rarefied air occupied by past games like Shade, Babel, or Delusions. This year, after going through 25 games, the same thing was happening. Until now.

Despite its somewhat unpromising title, TDMAMOOM is a fantastic game through and through. How do I love this game? Let me count the ways. Okay, first, there’s the writing. Frankly, I could spend the entire review talking just about the writing, it’s so great, so I’ll restrict myself to just a few examples picked more or less arbitrarily. There are numerous instances of excellent foreshadowing, whether of themes or puzzles — in the former case, they add great pleasure on re-reading, and in the latter case they operate as a delightfully subtle but effective hint system. The room descriptions are masterfully done, drawing from an endless well of cleverness to make the typical exit listing sound fresh and interesting. Best of all, the writing in this game is just flat-out funny, sometimes howlingly so. Just one example of many — looking at a palm scanner after you’ve switched bodies with an NPC:

>x panel
Flat black glass, a panel that uses all manner of fancy beams to read
over your palm-print and check you are who you think you are.
Unfortunately, it's not clever enough to realise you now think you
are someone that you actually aren't. Or you think you are someone
who you're not, but really are. Or something like that. Anyway, it's
a pig-ignorant machine.

I love it when an IF game makes me laugh out loud, and that happened frequently in this game.

Then there’s the coding. This coding is good. Really good. A raft of nonstandard verbs get recognized and handled. There are a variety of special commands provided, such as “R” or “REVIEW”, which repeats the room description without using any game time. Descriptions of rooms, objects and events alter themselves in various subtle and blatant ways, depending on what’s come before. Timed events, even events where a huge amount is happening at once, run smoothly along their tracks with nary a glitch. There’s a very fine adaptive hint system, quite sensitive to situation and even possessing a self-destruct capability that removes the blatant walkthrough answers after the comp period has ended. Library messages adapt seamlessly to the PC’s situation and point-of-view.

Oh, and how could I forget the special effects? TDMAMOOM takes control of the interpreter to create a beautiful Infocom/Inform-style look-and-feel; people who don’t care for the general appearance of TADS games should definitely try this one. The game even features a little bit of sound, throwing in a system beep at an appropriate time.

Working with the coding and the writing to propel this game to greatness, the story is killer, a wild thrill ride through surprises small and large. Like its predecessors Delusions and Babel, TDMAMOOM takes place in that most favored of IF locales, an isolated scientific research station. I won’t even get into the plot here, because players should experience it for themselves with as few spoilers as possible up front, except to say that it all fits together very nicely, and every time I had doubts, the game anticipated them and tied up the loose ends.

Along with all this, just a quick word about the puzzles: many of them are not only inventive but pitched at just the right level of difficulty, providing several of those wonderful “aha!” moments for me. Some of them are rather complicated, but they’re always scrupulously fair. I ended up turning to the hints so that I could see more of the game before time ran out, but I think if I’d had the time available, this game’s puzzles would have rewarded me for spending it.

So we’re talking about a pretty phenomenal game, here. In fact, almost depressingly so, given that I’m an entrant this year and TDMAMOOM is miles better than my game. It’s not perfect, mind. I found a few spelling and grammar errors, and there were times I wished for clearer descriptions of events and objects. But those flaws are minor and cosmetic, and they do nothing to change the fact that this is a damn good game. Bravo.

Rating: 9.8

Constraints by Martin Bays [Comp02]

IFDB page: Constraints
Final placement: 19th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

I’m far from the first person to make this claim, but I think every piece of art is, to some greater or lesser degree, about the art form itself. Every novel is at least a little bit about the novel, every film is at least a little bit about the cinema. And every text game is at least a little bit about IF itself. Then there are those that are very much about the form. Constraints is one of these. It disarmed me by admitting upfront, in fact brandishing, the fact that it was going to consist of constrained interactions. It then sets out to explore not only the idea of constraint, and the ways that interaction in a text game can be constrained, but how to make those constrained interactions effective, and even fun.

Of course, it’s not the first game to tread this ground — Photopia and Rameses have famously drawn from the same well — but it’s the first one I’ve seen that devotes itself so purely to the concept, free of any particular narrative or character. However, because of the way it’s structured, it’s rather difficult to talk about without giving too much away. What I can say, though, is that although at one point it enumerates the types of constraints it claims to employ, there is one that it doesn’t include in its list but which features prominently throughout the game.

I’m referring to the fact that although you have the opportunity to play several characters in Constraints (all of whom are in some restricted situation, natch), they all share a common trait: the desire not to be constrained. In each scenario, I struggled for a bit against the circumstances, but then tried doing things that would indicate a certain peace with the situation. Each time, I was rebuffed, instructed that the character’s desire outweighed whatever notions I might have about graceful acceptance. I’m not complaining about this. It’s quite legitimate to instruct a player about how to behave in character when a character is specified, and in a game this skillfully done, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the additional level of constraint was quite intentional.

The idea intrigues me, though. How much of what we call constraints in our lives are simply produced by our own desires, more or less independent of our circumstances? When we feel held down, held back, would the feeling disappear if we decided that we no longer wanted whatever lay on the other side of the barrier? For that matter, can a constraint even exist without a corresponding desire to define it as such? In this game, the question is moot — there’s no way of changing the characters’ desires — but I really like it that the experience of playing made me think about such a philosophical issue in my own life.

It helps a lot that Constraints is quite exquisitely implemented. It’s clear that this game has been tested thoroughly — not only did I find no bugs, but several times throughout the game, I had the exciting experience of trying a fairly unusual action, and seeing that the game anticipated it and handled it expertly. The game uses the z-machine’s color capabilities quite nicely (thereby giving me another reason to be thankful to David Kinder for the new WinFrotz 2002 interpreter), and in another section commits an impressive (though not quite unprecedented) z-machine abuse.

For the most part, the writing hews to the same high standard, though there are several instances of rather strange word choices. I’m not sure whether these were simply typos, or whether they indicate that perhaps English isn’t the author’s first language. If the latter is true, then Constraints is to be commended all the more for the level of mastery it does attain. Despite all this, I can’t quite bring myself to rate the game a 10. Even though it was thought-provoking and nicely crafted, in the end I didn’t find it terribly enjoyable; I don’t really like being constrained. Nevertheless, this is an excellent work of IF, and a fascinating metatreatise on “puzzleless” IF in general.

Rating: 9.3

Jane by Joseph Grzesiak [Comp02]

IFDB page: Jane
Final placement: 10th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Note: Because strong language and themes of domestic abuse appear in this game, they will also appear in this review.

A couple of years ago, I released a game with some pretty intense themes, including rape, murder, and slavery. Aside from whatever other ways my game succeeded or failed, people’s reactions to encountering this sort of thing in a work of IF varied a lot. Some people really appreciated it, others… not so much. One player rather memorably described it this way: “After playing, my head felt like someone had been hitting it very hard with a solid metal thing.” After playing this game, I understand a little more where that guy was coming from.

Jane takes on the topic of wife-beating, portraying it from the perspective of the victim, the abuser, and a few others besides. The experience of playing through a story in IF form, as opposed to reading it on the page, really intensifies my identification with the characters, and there were moments during my time with Jane that I started feeling physically ill, and dirty, involved in something I did not wish to be a part of. I don’t mean to sound disapproving — those moments were quite powerful and dramatic, and the game did give a clear warning about its subject matter before it began. Indeed, the times when I was feeling the most upset were when I was admiring Jane the most; its writing and its implementation occasionally managed to affect me quite strongly.

On the other hand, that effect was only occasional, for several reasons. First of all, though I applaud it for its ambition in getting inside the heads of abuser, victim, and onlookers, the characterization frequently fell a bit flat for me. The dialogue and actions of the characters sometimes rang quite true, but other times felt fairly stock, as if pulled from one of those movies that always seem to be running on the Lifetime channel. Another, more severe issue is that presenting a story like this interactively is a major challenge, and the game wasn’t always prepared to meet that challenge. At its worst moments, the clash between the intense action of the story and the standard Inform library responses evoked by my actions was outright comical, completely defeating the drama:

"You'd have nothing!" he shouts, continuing his rant. "No one would
ever want you. You're of no use to anyone. You'd be nothing."

>get vase
That's hardly portable.

John's lost in his mind again. "You ARE nothing!" he shouts again. He
steps forward quickly and shoves you back, causing you to stumble to
keep your balance. "You're useless! You're so fucking useless!"

>push john
That would be less than courteous.

Those library messages, quite suitable in the majority of IF situations, are laughably inappropriate here, and either the author or the testers should have caught them. The debugging verbs should also have been turned off — the effect of these things together was that Jane had a fairly rushed feel. Even more damaging, by failing to account for fairly reasonable actions, the game makes itself too vulnerable to ridiculousness, which is poison to the kind of tragic storytelling it attempts.

Even when it does properly account for the player’s input, though, Jane usually feels quite straitjacketed. In fact, although the game borrows heavily from Photopia by using multiple perspectives (albeit a chronologically intact story) and a virtually identical approach to conversation, it reminded me less of Photopia than of Rameses. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the brilliant subversion of IF and storytelling that Rameses was, both because that game arrived first and because in its very use of multiple viewpoints and linear chronology, Jane dilutes the best rationale for its linearity.

I can see a viable argument that Jane (the NPC, not the game), and perhaps even her abusive husband, should present few real options to the player. They’re locked into the cycle of abuse, and the player’s frustration could mirror that of the characters as they try and fail to break out of their long-established patterns. However, that’s far less true for other characters, who lack such a reason for being bound to any particular course of action. In addition, as the intensity of the rising action builds, the characters should have more freedom available, as desperate measures become more and more plausible.

Since I experienced the story in accurate chronological order, I expected that at some point I’d be able to find my own way out of the ugly tangle of that relationship. Instead, what I found was that I had to follow the game’s singular path through it, and that meant enduring just as much abuse as the game decided it ought to commit. In my own way, I felt a little battered by the time I finished. I did finish, though. I didn’t quit. I guess I was asking for it.

Rating: 6.5

Eric’s Gift by Joao Mendes [Comp02]

IFDB page: Eric’s Gift
Final placement: 16th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

In the “about” text for Eric’s Gift, the author mentions that much of the inspiration for the story came from a dream. Somehow, this seems appropriate, because the experience of playing the game was quite reminiscent of a recurring dream of mine: the one where I find myself in a play, but I don’t know my character or any of my lines. The other actors look at me expectantly, waiting for me to say the words that will advance the plot, and all I can do is madly improvise in a futile attempt to hit on the right topic.

Eric’s Gift is one of those games that runs on triggers — examining a particular thing, or asking about a particular subject, or performing some other action triggers a non-interactive cutscene, which changes the PC’s location and moves the plot along. When games like this work, they give the feeling of a story advancing smoothly, right in sync with the player’s actions. When one breaks down, though, it’s hell — players flounder about looking for the right action as the plot’s momentum evaporates, along with the fun of the game. Rather than guess-the-verb or guess-the-noun, the whole thing becomes a game of guess-the-trigger, which is worse than either one, since it encompasses both verbs and nouns, but you can never be sure which you’re trying to guess at any given moment.

That’s just what happened to me in Eric’s Gift. I was in a conversation scene where, unbeknownst to me, I needed to examine a sub-object of an object (that is to say, a second-level noun) in order to trigger the next scene. Thinking I’d examined everything, and having tried to leave, or do various other more or less appropriate actions, I kept fishing for new things to ask about, feeling like one of those characters in Sartre’s No Exit, doomed to spend all eternity trapped with the same annoying person.

In a situation like this, it really helps a lot if the game is thoroughly implemented, and in part, Eric’s Gift accomplishes this. All available scenery objects are described, and a few off-the-beaten-path conversation topics are implemented, too. However, as time wore on and I kept not guessing the trigger, the NPC began to feel more and more threadbare, always failing to respond to my increasingly desperate topic choices.

Perhaps part of my problem was that I was a bit distracted by the game’s insistent use of the same metaphor over and over and OVER again. Saying that a woman has a “light in her eyes” is already a bit of a cliché, but quite tolerable if said once, maybe even twice. This game hits it so often that it becomes comical. My breaking point was when I encountered this description: “Her eyes shine with a light of their own, with an intensity that almost blinds you.” Mind you, there had already been many repetitions of the “light in the eyes” theme, but this one was way, way over the top. How could the light in someone’s eyes, which I take to mean an animated, vivacious expression, almost blind me? I couldn’t help but picture the NPC with high-beam headlights for eyes, the PC shielding his face from the glare. The lesson here is that any given metaphor is best used sparingly — the more often we see it, the less effective it becomes.

My other issue with Eric’s Gift is that it is pointlessly science-fictional. What I mean by that is that although the story is set in the future, it gains virtually nothing thereby. A few details are changed here and there — people drink “synthcaf” instead of coffee, the TV is called a “tri-di”, and so forth — but otherwise the story might just as well be set in 2002. Not one significant point of plot or character derives from the futuristic setting, and consequently that setting is little more than a distraction.

Adding a science-fictional sheen to an otherwise mundane story doesn’t somehow make that story cooler. Quite the contrary, in fact — it drains the story of mainstream appeal while gaining nothing in sf credibility. Oh, and one more thing: there are serious logical holes in the plot, especially in the defining element of the plot. Although its writing and coding was competent, the logical flaws, awkward emotion, and frustrating design make Eric’s Gift one that I won’t be keeping.

Rating: 5.4

Ramon and Jonathan by Daniele A. Gewurz [Comp02]

IFDB page: Ramon and Jonathan
Final placement: 36th place (of 38) in the 2002 Interactive Fiction Competition

Since classical times, stories have opened “in medias res.” This phrase, Latin for “in the middle of things”, refers to a narrative that begins during some crucial piece of action, filling in the background and the preceding events sometime later. Ramon and Jonathan fulfills the former part of this bargain, but never the latter. The game drops us into some sort of science-fictional scenario where some (maybe) criminals are being exonerated, or extradited, or something, and suggests that we’re not happy with the situation. Then there’s an unintuitive door-opening puzzle, a bit of quick noun-guessing with an NPC, and then it’s over. We never learn the backstory behind who did what to whom and why, who lives on what planet and how they got there, or who any of these characters even are.

Because the first (and really only) puzzle didn’t make any sense to me, I turned to the walkthrough in record time, but even after I had walked through the game, I still didn’t really get it. As I always say in these situations, that may be because I’m dense, but egomaniac that I am, I’m more inclined to believe that the game did an insufficient job of explaining itself.

Not helping matters was the fact that the prose is written in not-quite-fluent English. It’s not terrible, mind you — many of the sentences pass muster without a problem, but those that don’t are really jarring. For instance:

>x people
The audience has been waiting for years this moment, and is mostly
greatly disappointed for the two "hangmen" to have been virtually
cleared. Everybody rumble and yell.

The first sentence is almost up to snuff, if only “years” and “for” exchanged places — it would still sound awkward and clunky after that, but would at least be grammatically correct. The second sentence sounds stereotypically, almost laughably wrong, as if it were written for a Bronson Pinchot character.

You know, I’ve said this before: I don’t care whether English is your first language or not, but I do care about fluency and readability. If you can’t write fluent English, either don’t write a text adventure in English or make sure to have your text adventure thoroughly proofed and corrected before inflicting it on the world. I don’t mean to sound harsh, but if you want to produce something good, you simply must make sure the writing works.

It’s also a good idea to fully implement everything you put in your game. Ramon and Jonathan, short though it is, is poorly equipped to handle any deviation from its plotline. Anything outside the bounds of the walkthrough is handled in one of two ways. The first method is simply to end the game. This happened to me on my first half-dozen playthroughs — either because I walked in a disallowed direction or because I failed to solve the timed puzzle, the game abruptly kicked me to the curb and told me to restore or restart. Restarting wasn’t terrible, because I’d invariably just played a few moves anyway, but the frequency of the situation made it clear that there wasn’t much room to wander.

The other, much worse method that the game uses to handle players that leave the path is to simply do nothing. At one point, I wandered into a room with no less than five NPCs, all of whom may as well have been statues for all that they responded to me. Eventually I figured out I must be doing something wrong because my current situation was so amazingly dull. This does not make for a fun game — utter boredom shouldn’t be the tool that forces players to comply with the plot. So finally, I restarted, hit the walkthrough, made the required twenty moves, and the game ended. Or rather, if an ending implies that everything has been tied up and some sort of dramatic conclusion has been reached, it’s probably more accurate to say the game stopped.

Rating: 4.3